


Whence Solace Comes

by Carmarthen



Category: Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca - Levay/Kunze
Genre: Coda, F/M, Future Fic, Greece, Married Couple, POV Third Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 15:50:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5133319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/pseuds/Carmarthen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maxim and Mrs. de Winter in Greece, long after Manderley.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whence Solace Comes

**Author's Note:**

> As fluffy as I could make it! :-) It's been too long since I read the book so I didn't dare try first person pastiche, but it's musical fic anyway, although with a few little references to the book.

The blue of the Aegean had startled her at first, a blue so deep and bright and turquoise-edged it looked like a painting.

Now she saw it every morning from the balcony of their hotel room as she spread toast with butter and marmalade and poured tea and Maxim read letters, if they had come. Not so many now, for much of his former circle had drifted away, but Bea wrote faithfully, always cheerful, homey little letters that did not mention the past, or Manderley, at all. They had put that behind them, and now the future was an endless stretch of Aegean blue, of marmalade on toast and going down to the market after breakfast to buy a scarf or a jar of olives or a melon, fresh and sweet and dripping with juice; of writing letters and reading novels and watching the sunset hand-in-hand. An old married couple.

The spring rains had almost passed, but summer's heat had not fully set in, so she wore a wrap as she sat out on the balcony, a thin wool thing with a blue design that Maxim had bought for her in Crete, and watched the sea, flat and blue to the horizon.

They were comfortable together now, her and Maxim, in a way that she could not have imagined before in her anxious all-consuming need to be loved. Sometimes she wondered what the girl she had been would have thought of this, living in hotels in exotic lands, forgetting to wear a hat until her skin turned brown as a Greek's, watching dolphins leap out there in the calm sea, their sleek bodies effortlessly twisting through the air.

She supposed she would have found it very exciting, much more exciting than it really was.

But that wasn't what was important, in the end.

"What are you smiling about, my dear?"

She turned to look at Maxim as he came to stand beside her—a little bent, a great deal more grey. In his pale linen suit, he didn't look at all like he belonged in some severe old painting. He didn't frighten her at all anymore. Nothing did.

She took his hand—she had loved his hands from the first, those slim graceful hands that she had wanted to draw with a girlish ferocity that unsettled her—and pressed it to her lips. "I was only thinking that I do believe I am rather happy today."

"I am glad," he said, and to take away the faint look of confusion on his face, she stood on her toes to kiss him, and then leaned close, nestling against his shoulder.

Yes. She rather thought this was happiness.


End file.
